BATON ROUGE - Year after year, hundreds to nearly a thousand bills are filed during the regular legislative session, and just over half of them actually become law.

So far, 1,376 bills have been filed for this year's legislative session, but Dr. Steven Procopio, President of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, says that number is actually a lot less than it was two decades ago.

Procopio says over time, there have been fewer and fewer bills filed, about a third less than what they used to be during the non-fiscal legislative sessions.

"You look, 10-15 years ago, you're going to see about 2,000 bills, and really, you go back to 2000-2003, you're going to see 3,000 bills filed," Procopio said.

But is the large number of bills necessary?

"One person's unnecessary is another's crucial, and so you have to be careful because that bill might really matter. You might think that's not really important, but it might really matter to that legislator and to that legislator's constituents," Procopio said.

State Senator Royce Duplessis says legislators are elected to represent the issues that matter to their constituents, and putting a limit on that would be putting a limit on the democratic process.

"While on one hand, it can seem like a lot and some may argue that too many bills may be filed, but the reality is that these are the issues, and everyone who gets elected, whether you're a House member or a Senate member, you have the right to bring a piece of legislation, whether it passes or not," Duplessis said.

Procopio says that as the number of bills filed has gone down, the number that actually pass continues going up.

"A lot of sort of the fewer bills that, weren't going to pass in the first place, just aren't getting filed to begin with. So in some ways, I guess we are getting more efficient, it's always dangerous do say that about the legislature, but at least from just the data in terms of percentage of bills passing, it seems more efficient," Procopio said.

Legislators in states like Texas, Montana, North Dakota, and Nevada meet biannually for their legislative session. But, Procopio says he's not sure if transitioning to something like that here in Louisiana is worth it.